George W. Bush: War Criminal

03.16.09

It’s amazing how quickly we forget what a totally corrupt and illegal presidency we just endured for the past eight years now that we have a president who actually understands that he is not above the law.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, and the whole lot should be tried for war crimes. I bet they’d be found guilty. You can’t just throw the rules out the window because we had an attack on our soil. Remember when we threw Japanese-Americans into internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor? And now we consider that to have been a horribly inappropriate, unjust, and illegal act that no one condones. This is one of those same things. And we should take those responsible to court. Even if it’s the former president.

The question you have to ask yourself is a relatively simple one. Does this treatment amount to “severe mental or physical pain or suffering” in the pursuit of intelligence? If it does, then Bush and Cheney have to go to jail for the commission of war crimes.
Why is this a difficult question to answer?

It’s not difficult. And maybe if Bush hadn’t completely decimated the world’s economy, our current government could put more effort into making him pay for his actions.

I’d be very curious to hear how anyone could defend Bush right now. Please, feel free to explain it in the comments. And do so without making some ridiculous correlation to Obama. Obama wasn’t president then so leave him out of it. One person’s mistakes don’t make another’s okay.

It all depends on whether or not you win or lose the war in which those crimes were committed. After the close of WWII, many Nazis were tried and sentenced for their war crimes, but it wasn’t even a question as to whether or not the US had done anything against the rules.

You’ll see this time and again, I think. The question with the Bush administration is much more difficult. How to you convict anyone of anything while a war is still dragging on, and with no clear winner and/or loser? Tricky…

In that case the war had to be over because the winning countries were going to try the losing countries’ leaders for war crimes. But in this case, it is different in that we are essentially asking our own government to try our own former governmental leaders. If you look at it that way, it’s no wonder it’s not happening. It would take quite a lot of humility to try our own elected leadership for those types of crimes. But it would fall into the new mentality of the current administration: transparency. And accepting fault.

Either way, the crimes of torture and breaking the Geneva Convention can be tried without waiting for any war to be over. The evidence is there. So are the victims. And just because someone was tortured doesn’t mean they weren’t guilty of something. I doubt these guys were innocent in this “war on terror.” But it also doesn’t mean that we should’ve waterboarded them.